As uncertainty and frustration gripped Capitol Hill in Washington on Thursday, members of Colorado’s congressional delegation grappled with the near-certainty of an approaching federal government shutdown.

While the Democratic-controlled Senate moved ahead with a bipartisan measure aimed at funding the government past Saturday at midnight, Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made clear that he won’t take up the Senate bill as GOP lawmakers fought openly over a potential alternative plan.

“In my district, we have the Federal Center — there’s 6,000 federal workers who work in Jefferson County, who live in the community, who once again don’t know if they’re going to be getting their paychecks,” U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen, a Lakewood Democrat, told Colorado Politics. “It’s just absolute insanity. This is not governing. Our country deserves better.”

If the deadline passes without spending legislation making its way to President Joe Biden’s desk, more than 50,000 active duty military personnel in Colorado could be required to work without being paid until the shutdown ends, with another 40,000 federal workers in the state facing furloughs or the prospect of delayed paychecks. In addition, payments for some federal programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, could grind to a halt if the shutdown is prolonged.

Pettersen and fellow members of the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus have been floating a framework for a continuing resolution aimed at keeping the government funded into January. The proposal, which includes aid to Ukraine, additional funding for disaster assistance and increased funding for border security, also incorporates reforms to the congressional budget process.

The aim, she said, would be “changing the process for funding our government so that we’re not in this position in the future, and we don’t have extremists holding our government hostage.”

Added Pettersen: “It’s really problematic for not only people in the short-term and the chaos that it creates, but this is detrimental to our economy immediately, and it also has significant long term effects globally. We’re supposed to be the strongest democracy in the world, and we continue to lose credibility and our position in the world when we can’t even do our basic functions.”

Across the aisle, U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Silt Republican, on Thursday afternoon joined more than two dozen fellow members of the hardline conservative House Freedom Caucus in a letter asking McCarthy for information about his intentions before, the lawmakers say, “even considering a stop-gap funding measure.”

“Mr. Speaker, we need leadership and a clear plan on spending to get to an end game here — most importantly, with wins for the American People,” the lawmakers wrote.

The lawmakers asked McCarthy to “publicly refute and reject” the Senate’s continuing resolution and wanted to know what the speaker was doing to “proactively oppose and defeat this ‘Omnibus Preparation Act,'” referring to the longstanding congressional habit of approving the annual federal budget in a catch-all omnibus bill rather than individual bills for each federal agency.

The letter asks detailed questions about whether the House will stay in session until lawmakers consider the dozen annual appropriations bills making their way through the House, including four that were scheduled for votes late Thursday and two that are still awaiting action in committee.

“We remain ready to continue working in good faith with our colleagues across the Republican Conference to advance appropriations; likewise, we expect you to take every step necessary to pass these bills — starting with the four bills now under consideration to fund approximately two-thirds of the federal government,” the lawmakers wrote.

Under a plan pushed by some House Republicans and embraced by McCarthy, the chamber won’t consider a temporary spending bill until the House has passed the largest of the pending appropriations bills, though the bills are considered dead on arrival in the Senate due to Republican-led massive spending cuts and policy amendments.

In a telephone town hall late Thursday, Boebert insisted that she’s working to “avoid a shutdown,” saying that the House was doing what it was supposed to by considering individual appropriations bills rather than packaging the government’s annual spending in “massive omnibus bills.”

“Unfortunately, you know, there are some really great gems in bills like that, but the process is broken,” she said. “We’ve been governing like this since the mid-1990s. And that’s why in January during the speaker’s fight, I took a stand to make historic, fundamental changes to ensure that we will do our job in the House of Representatives to pass 12 individual appropriations bills and go line by line to make sure that you are represented.”

Boebert’s colleague and fellow Freedom Caucus member, U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, told CNN late Thursday that he didn’t sign the letter because he disagreed with airing the party’s internal disagreements in public, The Windsor Republican also took issue with the group’s opposition to additional aide to Ukraine.

“If we’re going to have meetings in the Republican family, we should do it behind closed doors, number one, and number two, I think when they start adding Ukraine in as one of their demands, that we shouldn’t fund Ukraine anymore, I’m just not in with that,” Buck said. “I think we’ve got to make sure that Putin does not win this war, and I think we have to make sure that we support Ukraine to the point that we can and be realistic about it. But I really think that they’re conflating some issues that don’t need to be conflated at this point.”

Buck added that GOP leadership’s decision to hold a hearing as part of its inquiry into impeaching Biden was a bad idea with a shutdown looming.

“It concerns me about House Republicans’ priorities and also concerns me about the public perception of our party being able to run the U.S. House,” he said. “I think that there is nothing worse than the shutdown. I think this is an embarrassment. We knew that Sept. 30 was coming for a long time. We should have been talking in July about a continuing resolution. It doesn’t have to be done on the eve of a shutdown.”